North African history

Silencing the Berbers

By guest contributor Rosalie Calvet

 A little less than a year ago, a prestigious American university hosted a conference about French-Algerian history, gathering the leading specialists of the topic.

A prominent French scholar closed his presentation by opening the debate to the audience. Immediately, one of his North American fellows asked “Since you do not speak Arabic, do you feel somewhat limited in your work on French Algeria?”

“I see what you mean,” he replied, “but fortunately, we have the archives of the colonial administration, so French is enough.”

Suddenly, a man, sitting on the first row of the audience, stood up, and, speaking in French, replied “I am Algerian. I was born before the Independence. You taught us French and nothing else. We had to learn Arabic after the War of Liberation. Arabic must come back to Algeria.”

And then, another man, sitting next to him, added “Arabic … and Berber. Nobody talks about Berber. Historians have forgotten that North Africa is the land of the Berbers.”

Who are the Berbers?

The indigenous population of North Africa, the Berbers call themselves i-Mazigh-en, “free-men” or “noble” in Tamazight. If over the centuries, the Berbers have split into smaller communities, the Chleus in Morocco, the Touaregs in Libya and the Kabyles in Algeria, they have remained faithful to a clear sense of unity. The history of the Berbers is that of an identity constantly reshaped by internal and external mutations, of cultural blending and ongoing intellectual developments and innovations. Invaded by the Phoenicians around 800 BC, the Berbers were incorporated into the Roman Empire in 200 BC and their land constituted the cradle of European Christianity. The Arab Conquest of the seventh century led to the merging of Berber and Arab culture, the conversion to Islam and the fall of the Christian Church. Between the eighth and ninth centuries, a series of Muslim-Berbers dynasties ruled over the Maghreb (the Arabic name for North Africa) achieving its territorial and political unity. Most of the region, except for Morocco, passed under Ottoman domination in 1553 and remained part of the empire until the nineteenth century. During this period, the three political entities composing modern North Africa emerged. While Tunisia and Morocco were to become protectorates of France, in 1881 and 1912 respectively, Algeria was to be French for over a century.

During the first decades of colonial rule (1830-1871), the French authorities privileged Berbers over their Arab fellows (8). The main goal of the administration was to eradicate Islam from Algerian identity (23). According to French observers, the Berbers seemed keener to renounce their Muslim legacy, as they more closely resembled the French and shared their Christian roots.

Delacroix

Eugène Delacroix, Fantasia Arabe (1833), Städelscher Museums, Germany. One of Delacroix’s most famous representations, of a “fantasia” (a traditional Berber military game played on horseback) he witnessed in North Africa. The composition, centered on three moving figures, reflects Delacroix’s fascination with the ‘wildness’ of the cultures he depicts.

To fuel this narrative, the French progressively constructed the “Kabyle Myth.” In 1826, the Abbé Raynal claimed that the Kabyles were of “Nordic descent, directly related to the Vandals, they are handsome with blues eyes and blond hair, their Islam is mild.” Tocqueville wrote in 1837 that the “Kabyle soul” was opened to the French (182). Ten years later, the politician Eugène Daumas claimed that the “Kabyle people, of German descent […] had accepted the Coran but had not embraced it [and that on many aspects] the Kabyles still lived accordingly to Christian principles” (423). This the reason why French colonial officer Henri Aucapitaine concluded that: “in one hundred years, the Kabyles will be French” (142).

The situation shifted in 1871 when two hundred and fifty Kabyle tribes, or a third of the Algerian population, revolted against the colonial authorities. The magnitude of the uprising was such that the French decided to “fight the Berber identity […] which in the [long-run] empowered the Arabs.”

From then on, the differences between the Berbers and the Arabs became irrelevant to France’s main priority: to maintain its control over the local populations by fighting Islam. The idea emerged that to be assimilated to the French Republic, Algerian subjects needed to be “purified” from their religious beliefs.

By the Senatus-Consulte of July 14th, 1865, the French had ruled that “Muslim Algerians were granted the right to apply for French citizenship […] once they had renounced their personal status as Muslims”(444). This law, which had established a direct link between religion on the one hand and political rights on the other, now further reflected the general sense of disregard towards the diversity of cultural groups in Algeria, all falling into the same overarching category of Muslim. After the 1880s, the French gave up on the Kabyle myth, marginalizing the Berbers who had become a source of agitation.

Rousseau

Henri Rousseau, La Baie d’Alger (1880), Private Collection. In this view of the Bay of Algiers, the Douanier Rousseau pictures a Berber tribe.

As the independent Republic of Algeria triumphed in the Fall of 1962, the newly funded regime identified the Berbers as posing an “existential threat to the Arabo-Muslim identity of the country” (103).

Repeating the French practice of destroying those regional identities allegedly challenging the legitimacy of an aggressively centralized and centralizing state, the leaders of Algeria denounced the political claims of the Berbers as a “separatist conspiracy,” and after 1965 the Arabization policy became systematic throughout the country.

To assess the respective impact of colonization, nineteenth and twentieth century nationalist pan-Arab ideologies and the role of post-independence Algerian leaders upon the persecution of the Kabyles after 1962 constitutes a somewhat limited debate.

It is, however, critical to acknowledge the responsibility of the French state in the marginalization of the Berbers after the 1871 Kabyle riot. Progressively, the colonial administration changed a model of mixed and complex identities strongly rooted the Maghreb tradition into a binary model (235). Within this two-term model, people could only define themselves on one side or the other of a rigid frontier separating authentic French culture from supposedly authentic colonized culture. As Franco Tunisian Historian Jocelyn Dakhlia argues in Remembering Africa, “the consequence of such a dualistic opposition of colonial identities was [… ] that the anticolonial movement stuck to this idea of an authentic native Muslim Arabic identity,  excluding the Berbers” (235).

The very existence of the Berbers thwarts any attempt to analyze Algerian society in a way that resorts to a rigid griddle, whether in racial, cultural or religious terms.

This is probably the reason why the French, and after them the independent Algerian state, have utterly repressed the legacy of Berber culture in the country: for the Berbers could not exist in the dualistic narrative underlying both colonial and anti-colonial. As historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot, would argue, they became unthinkable, and were silenced and excluded from History.

Yet, the most curious factor in this non-history is the paucity of French scholarship on the issue. (50). While some academics do focus on creating conversations and producing literature on the question of Berber identity, the most renowned French scholars systematically fail at doing so. As a direct consequence, most French academic discourses reproduce and maintain the somewhat convenient imperial division opposing the “Arabs” in the North to the “Blacks” in the South of Africa, thereby forgetting that the Sahara is not a rigid racial frontier, and that for centuries the Berbers have been circulated throughout the region.

Poster

Centenaire de l’Algérie – Grandes Fêtes Sahariennes, Affiche, Musée de l’Immigration, Paris. This poster, issued by the French government in 1930, is an invitation to a military parade featuring colonial soldiers to commemorate the centenary of the 1830 conquest of Algiers.

Ultimately, the Berbers blurry the lines between colonial and post-independent notions of identity in North Africa. To acknowledge the Berbers would require scholars to accept their fluidity – a direct threat to the Western appeal for systemic and pseudo-universalist thinking, still prevalent in French academia despite the emergence post-colonial studies in the 1960s.

Recognizing the Berbers necessitates first, as claimed by Algerian scholar Daho Djerbal, to ask: who is the subject of History? This is the only way in which one can hope to put an end to the overly simplistic politics of identity imposed by the political power—on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea, on both shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

Rosalie Calvet is a paralegal working in New York City, freelance journalist and Columbia class of 2017 graduate. As a history major, Rosalie specialized on the historiography of French imperial history. Her senior thesis, “Thwarting the Other: a Critical approach to the  Historiography of French Algeria” was awarded the Charles A. Beard History Prize. In the future, Rosalie wishes to continue reflecting on otherness in the West—both through legal and academic lenses. More about Rosalie and her work is available on her website.

THE EDITORIAL AND THE POWER OF THE ARABIC-LANGUAGE PROVINCIAL PRESS

By guest contributor N. A. Mansour

Arabic periodicals are perhaps the greatest source for the history of the Arabic-speaking lands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Looking for Arabic primary sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be a minefield. Some archives are in warzones, others are chronically disorganized in under-funded archives, or in the worst cases, the sources simply do not exist. Periodicals survived through the aggregated power of steam, print, and colonial power: libraries across the globe subscribed to them, collected them, and many have since launched mass digitization projects. They are housed in comfortable libraries or even better, online, so long as you have an .edu login.

The story of the Arabic-language press is largely the story of Egypt and, even more specifically, of Cairo. Cairo also dominates much of the historiography of the Middle East and North Africa (see Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East). Egypt is painted in tones of exceptionalism: the first Arabic-speaking country in the Ottoman Empire to gain some semblance of independence in the 1820s, then the first in the Middle East to become a colonial project under the British in the 1880s. And Cairo was its founding city: an intellectual and cultural hub home to one of the world’s oldest universities, al-Azhar. And al-Waqa’i al-Misriyya (Egyptian Matters) was one of the first periodicals, issued by the khedival government for internal circulation amongst bureaucrats in 1828. Except Waqa’i did not have a wide reach and neither did its peers, notably al-Jarida al-‘Askariyya (The Military Journal) (1834) and Taqwim al-Akhbar ‘an al-Ḥawadith al-Tijariyya wa’l-I’lanat al-Malikiyya (A Summary of Trade News and Property Announcements) (1848–49). (For transliterating names, titles, and terms from Arabic, I used the standards known as simplified IJMES [International Journal for Middle Eastern Studies].) Except, the first major Arabic-language newspapers did not come from Egypt. Rather, the Arabic-language periodicals to have the greatest impact on the press as a genre of writing began as a provincialized enterprise, somewhat independent of traditional intellectual centers.

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Al-Ra’id al-Tunisi, July 24, 1861
(British Library)

The Ottoman government, ironically enough, set the precedent for a private press, partially because they funded one of the first major private periodicals in the most unlikely of places: the province of Tunisia, which was only nominally under Ottoman control by the mid-1800s. Al-Ra’id al-Tunisi (The Tunisian Pioneer) was launched on June 22, 1860 as a weekly newspaper, with support from Maltese printing enterprises and one Mr. Richard Holt, based in Tunisia. An official governmental paper, it was founded with the explicit goal of being a newspaper for the general public, with news deemed useful by the head of the provincial council. It was also vehement in its dedication to “spreading truth.” Al-Ra’id quickly emerged as a soapbox for commentary on local, regional, and even global news. It originally included a lengthy section for qism rasmi or official news, alongside an equally long qism ghayr rasmi, a section for unofficial news. However, the official news component became steadily less present, especially because the only distinction between the official and unofficial news was its source. Both sections covered political news, where the provincial government selected what went under the heading qism rasmi and the editor Sa’id Hamid Burq al-Qawafi was responsible for the remainder of the paper; that is the qism ghayr rasmi. But al-Ra’id took yet another step away from its governmental connections and thus, another step towards becoming “private:” it ran opinion pieces under the unofficial news platform. For example, the March 26, 1872 issue of al-Ra’id discusses the provincial council’s annual budget at excruciating length. This might not seem extraordinary, but it was not until a decade and a half later that the opinion piece—or perhaps, the editorial—would securely be featured in the vast majority of Arabic-language newspapers. Al-Ra’id actually appears to have been one of the first Arabic-language newspapers in the Arabic-speaking world to run opinion pieces, before its contemporary, the Beirut weekly Hadiqat al-Akhabar (The Garden of News), which only adopted opinion pieces in the late 1860s. The September 25, 1860 issue of al-Ra’id had addressed the ministers of the Tunisian province on Tunis’s political isolation and the necessity of finding some way to counter it.

But that does not mean al-Raid al-Tunisi was both pioneer and trend-setter. Subscriptions to the newspaper went from being regional, from the province of Tunisia itself as far afield as Alexandria and Beirut in 1860, to purely provincial by 1862. It is therefore unlikely that al-Ra’id al-Tunisi influenced other Arabic-language newspapers to begin publishing editorials or opinion pieces (Al-Ra’id al-Tunisi, July 24, 1861). It also does not exactly de-centralize Egypt, even though it clearly indicates that intellectual production aimed at the general public through the press was not unique to Egypt and predated Egypt’s rise as a print hub. Rather, the honor of decentralizing Egypt goes to a Lebanese Muslim living in the Ottoman capital.

 

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Ahmed Faris Shidyaq, date unknown.
Photo credit: https://ajdadalarab.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/  (أحمد-فارس-االشدياق)

Ahmad Faris Shidyaq founded al-Jawa’ib (The Answers) in 1860 in Istanbul, another unlikely Arabic press center. After all, Istanbul did not have the historic weight of Cairo or Fez as a center of Islamic learning, the bulk of which was done in Arabic and divided between different corners of the Muslim world. (That said, an argument can be made that Istanbul was a center for Islamic learning, primarily in the field of logic and rational sciences [see El-Rouayheb, Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century].) But Shidyaq himself was intersectional by nature. He had familiarity with Maronite theology, the faith into which he was born in Mount Lebanon, before he converted to Protestantism, then to Islam, and he was fluent in several languages, including French and English. Al-Jawaib was not only modelled on the European newspapers Shidyaq would have been exposed to while in Paris and England (where he was associated with the short-lived Paris-based Arabic-language newspaper ‘Utarid), but took inspiration from Shidyaq’s time in Malta and Egypt working closely with Arabic printers (see Alwan). It took several years for al-Jawa’ib to break away from a strictly news-based model—divided into internal and external news—and adopt the editorial, but when it did in 1865, the editorial was used, not simply to act as a soapbox on pertinent political issues, but to forge al-Jawaib’s political identity as a major force of pan-Islamism and Ottomanism (al-Jawa’ib, October 2, 1872). Shidyaq’s Ottomanist leanings are not surprising: he was originally invited to Istanbul at the behest of the Ottoman sultan. Nor is his pan-Islamism astonishing, premised more on Muslim solidarity than political unity (which in many instances ideologically served Ottomanism). However, it is significant that Shidyaq used the press to convey his political stance and that he specifically used the editorial to do so, placing it front and center on the first page of every issue.

But again, we face the question of influence: did al-Jawa’ib really set the standards for format and style for the emerging Arabic-language press? Yes, Shidyaq is remembered as one of the founding fathers of the nahda—the Arab intellectual renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—and as the author of perhaps the first Arabic novel, Saq ‘ala Saq (Leg over Leg), published in 1855. But perhaps his legacy is better placed in al-Jawa’ib. The paper had tremendous reach (see Al-Jawa’ib’s subscriptions rates, indicate where newspapers had marketing agents, for September 16, 1861; May 19, 1868; March 7, 1877) and was cited across Arabic newspapers for both its opinion pieces and the original news telegrams it published. And yes, there is a high possibility the notion of an editorial came itself from the influence of the European press, but al-Jawa’ib demonstrated to Arabic-language journalists that Arabic readers would read editorials. The editorial ultimately defined the Arabic newspaper, distinguishing it from the majalla, the journal or magazine, the likes of which emerged in Arabic in the mid-1870s as a genre dedicated almost singularly to objective knowledge, or ‘ilm, until the early twentieth century. But in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the genres flipped, with more emphasis on news in newspapers and the majalla becoming a major site of critical thought and political debate.

But back in the mid-to-late 1800s, Cairene periodicals were rather stagnant, still largely centered on those established during the 1820s through the 1840s. They were essentially governmental papers intended for internal distribution amongst the various branches of the Egyptian khedival government. But the Egyptian press would soon emerge as a major force, with distribution across the Arabic-speaking world. But contrary to the historiography, the ‘provincial’ press would remain unprovincial. Arabic-speakers as far afield as Singapore and Argentina would not simply look to Egypt and the sheer volume of periodicals it produced, but would also contribute to the global Arabic press market, changing the center of Arabic-language intellectual history as they did.

N. A. Mansour is a Ph.D. student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on Arabic-language intellectual history. She is working on a dissertation on the history of the Arabic-language press.